LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Death Penalty Mania

After checking the calendar, I see that it's time for my annual
"rant against the death penalty" letter. Since my last letter on this
topic Georgie W. has gone Federal, and call it coincidental if you
will, but already two people have been offed this year; this despite
a lapse of decades of executions by the Feds.

Some call this the Texas syndrome, which is probably a fair
assessment because the new Texas governor has a dozen or so
"half-and-half" clients lined up. In Tex talk this means half of them
retarded and the other half innocent.

Death penalty nuts always go in big for ceremony. They don't want
the guy to put himself to sleep in his cell during the night. So they
leave the lights on and pay a guard overtime to watch him. All this
to make sure he dies on time and certainly not when there's no
audience. Especially now when it's rumored that Attorney General
Ashcroft is making arrangements with HBO to get it all on
pay-per-view. Like, "Come on over and watch and yeah, bring the wife
and kids."

Another part of state-assisted murder that the fry 'em high crowd
loves is the details of "The Last Meal." It's common knowledge that a
victim with the IQ of a preemie always asks for a Kraft Dinner with a
side of lemon Jell-O and "I'll save the pudding for tomorrow."

Most of the others are like me and mutter, "I'm not hungry."
However, this quote is never quoted. Instead, a paid-off guard will
leak that the unrepentant perp requested: "Steak, fries, apple pie, a
good cigar and a double seven and seven." It would be further
reported that the two latter requests were denied as unhealthy and
soft on crime.

Even though the rest of the more civilized world has dumped the
death penalty, most Americans cling to it claiming it's a deterrent,
or it's moral closure, or it's something somewhere in the Bible. A
few of us say racism is the main reason death-penalty mania is big in
America. This upsets the white majority who insist racism was wiped
out by federal civil rights laws 35 years ago.

Yeah, right. Just like speeding was wiped out by municipal
speeding laws in 1900.

STEWART MacMILLAN
Guffin Bay, N.Y.

Death Penalty Does the Job

I have just finished reading another "sob sister" invective
against capital punishment by Hank Kalet ["A Penalty for All of
Us," 7/15/01 PP]. In the piece Kalet says, in effect, that
executing murderers "makes us like them." Since the story involved
convicted killer Juan Raul Garza, but was in fact centered on Timothy
McVeigh, I find it curious that Kalet would make allowances for a
crime of this magnitude.

In addition to murdering 168 people, two of whom were pregnant, 12
of whom were toddlers, McVeigh maimed and disfigured scores more, and
left a chain of relatives and loved ones who will forever catch sight
of empty places at the dinner table and undergo unfulfilled dreams of
what their children might have been.

Execution may be taking of a life, but so is a just war and
self-defense. There comes a point where a crime is so staggering, so
monstrous, that there is no justice short of taking the offender's
life. As McVeigh went to his death, he showed no remorse, there was
no flicker of contrition, not even a twinge of regret. What McVeigh
did feel sorry about, in his own words, is that he "failed to bring
the whole building down," killing all 400 inside, and that the deaths
of the children in the nursery school was "bad public relations" in
that it diverted attention away from his "message."

As for the "deterrent" effect of capital punishment, which Kalet
disavows, there is no way of know how many potential bomb planters
had second thoughts after McVeigh's execution. We do know that
McVeigh won't be planting any more bombs. And, again in his
all-knowing stance, Kalet assures us that "closure" wasn't
necessarily achieved by the families of the victims. I wonder what
astonishing capacity Kalet has to enter the minds of other people and
determine whether or not finality has been achieved.

Kalet is one of a strident throng alienated from the American
system and thus lacking any concern or interest about increasing
threats to our safety. Capital punishment is the redemption of a
contract that society owes to all human beings: to protect them and
to guard posthumously their dignity by taking the life of those who
took their lives. It is not Kalet's place to cancel that contract and
deny these victims justice when we have failed them in every other
way.

FRANK V. KLEINMER
Arlington, Va.

COLA: The Pay that Refreshes

Lyndon Johnson, like everyone else who lived through it, was
scarred by the big depression of the '30s. He much admired Roosevelt
with his New Deal programs to help get our economy back on track.
When Lyndon got in the Oval he announced his War on Poverty. The
first thing you thought of was that Jesus told us that the poor will
always be with us so that an effort to eliminate poverty would have
about as much success as an effort to eliminate sex.

Communist countries operate under a socialist system which means
that the state owns everything and the state is the only employer.
During Communist Poland the workers made the observation that "they"
pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. In America today the poor
are not the problem. The danger is in the millions who work and live
in sub-poverty conditions -- they may turn Polish on us and start
pretending to work.

It is morally wrong for a person to work hard all day long, do
good work, then at the end of the day discover that they have not
earned enough to pay for the basics of food, clothing and television.
The reason that this happens is that the Congress has kept the
minimum wage suppressed far too long. Out of a student body of 17,000
there are a hundred Harvard students who are beating the bushes for
everybody to be paid a living wage which is about $14 per hour. If
our minimum wage would have been on a COLA since 1980 it would be
about $9 per hour now.

As a minimum the 14 bucks may be a little much but the 9 sounds
about right. Still to go from our present $5.15 to $9 overnight would
be revolutionary whereas a more evolutionary program might be better.
One suggestion would be to raise the minimum wage 65 cents per hour
on Jan. 1 and an additional 65 cents each subsequent Jan. 1 for a
period of 20 years. This will be inadequate money but it would have
an enormous beneficial effect on poor people and it would establish
the principle that the minimum wage needs to be increased every
year.

In July 1991 I became 65 years old, retired, and started drawing
social security benefits. Today my benefits are 30% higher than they
were a decade ago. If it is fair for old people to be on a COLA then
why shouldn't minimum wage people be also on a COLA? Within the last
year or so several states have started putting their state minimum
wage on a COLA. Must be some thinking people in those states.

ROBERT PARNELL
Waco, Texas

No Hope in Democrats

It seems that many liberals and progressives are proclaiming that
the only possible way to end the right wing's destruction of what
little is left of this nation's dignity is to desert their deeply
held beliefs and to begin the Sisyphus-like task of persuading the
Democratic Party to return to its roots with the American people.

While that sounds wonderful and, in a perfect world, might even be
possible, in this world there is no hope of ever seeing a Democratic
politician truly represent the American worker or children or senior
citizen or much of anyone else who can't afford the Gucci shoes and
big time contributions. There are no Democrats on the current scene
from who I have any great expectations of magically turning their
backs on their corporate owners and, instead, to finally defend those
of us who aren't in the top 5% in income.

Instead, I believe that the only possible way to ever again be
represented in our government is to turn, en masse, to the third
party candidates. Only when our Congress and, someday, our White
House, is occupied by a large enough coalition of independent minds
and votes will anyone take the citizens of this nation seriously.
Only when we, the people, have true democratic representation will
the government again become ours.

I realize that there will be many who proclaim that it was the
votes for a honestly progressive candidate that allowed Bush to
become president. I can only answer that nonsense as I have always
have; Gore won the vote but allowed Bush to steal the office and the
only role Ralph Nader had was to force at least some small cracks in
the conservative media's mantra of "Greed Is Good and Unions are Bad
and Global Warming is a Myth".

I deeply hope that Nader will once again run for the presidency. I
will happily work for him and vote for him if he does. If not, I will
undoubtedly cast my vote for the candidate that most closely
represents my progressive and hopeful beliefs rather than just
another vote for the lesser of two great and nearly equal evils.

JOHN CANNON
Olancha, Calif.
Email jcannon@anotherperspective.org

Republicans are Americans

I consider Robert Parnell a friend even though he is
wrong-thinking about 98% of the time as is demonstrated in his letter
to the editor in your August 1-15 issue when he stated that "Last
year the United Supreme Court decided that America was better off
having the Republicans in charge than they would be having Americans
in charge."

It will no doubt come as a shock to the 50% of the voters in the
last election that they are no longer Americans. They may have been
born here, always paid their taxes, never convicted of a felony,
served their country in the armed forces or in several of many other
ways ... but they are no longer Americans because they don't agree
with Robert's muddled thinking.

Okay, according to Parnell, Republicans are clearly now
non-American. How about Green Peacers, or Peroites, or independents,
or Libertarians?

ROSS SAMS
Waco, Texas

Editor's Reply: The fact is that more Americans
voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. Bush got the votes of
approximately 48% of the national electorate, some 540,000 fewer than
Gore received, but the US Supreme Court, fearing that a recount of
Florida ballots might harm Bush's electoral chances, stopped the
state from counting its own votes in the presidential election. That
handed the election to Bush. Independent recounts conducted by news
media have demonstrated that the Florida election could have been
thrown in either direction, depending on how ballots were counted and
which absentee ballots were allowed to be counted. So the Supreme
Court disregarded the actual votes and threw the election to
Bush.

Capitalist Addicts

I happen to be of the World War 2 generation, having experienced
it on the other side (as a child in Germany). In the aftermath the
only viable entities were those of the United States, who waged war
abroad, but came away totally unscathed on its own territory. The
others were Sweden and Switzerland. The latter was mostly ignored by
the US, but the former (albeit small) was a target for severe
criticism. The fact that the alcohol consumption exceeded those of
other countries was attributed to the fact that people there had lost
their incentive, because they were living under socialism. Three
decades later the US and its citizens are laboring and agonizing over
the drug craze, which is unexcelled in all other industrialized
nations. Might it be that people here have lost their incentive,
because they are living under an unbridled capitalist system?

You be the judge.

JOE BAHLKE
Red Bluff, Calif.
Email jb1225@webtv.net

Every Cancer is Serious

I am writing to ask you to pay attention to lung cancer. As a lung
cancer survivor, I am limited in what I can do alone need all the
help I can get to change the course of this devastating disease. You
can call, write and fax your Congress members asking for more funding
for research dollars for early detection and new treatment options.
You can ask that November be designated National Lung Cancer
Awareness Month and ask for a congressional hearing. Consider that
lung cancer is the number one cancer killer, claiming more lives than
breast, prostate and colorectal cancers combined. That is about
157,000 men and women this year alone. There will be about 170,000
lung cancer diagnoses this year, Many of there will be at advanced
stages. There is less than $1000 spent on lung cancer research
[per lung cancer death]. Far less than is spent on breast
cancer and other diseases.

Perhaps we could get a semi-postal stamp such as the one for
breast cancer; at the very least we need more funding for early
detection so we can increase detection at earlier, more curable
stages. It has happened with breast cancer, cervical cancer and
prostate cancers -- so why not lung cancer as well?

MARY LYNN THOMPSON
Bryan, Texas

Bombs or Cancer Research

There is an article in the August 2001 Scientific American
(www.sciam.com), page 30, Profile with Peter H. Duseberg
concerning a "radical theory about cancer." German biologist Theodor
Boveri noted this so-called aneuploidy of tumor cells almost a
century ago and suggested that it could be the "CAUSE of CANCER"!

"Surely 5 percent of the funds for science could be set aside for
work on fringe theories that could be revolutionary."

Surely cancer research is as important as a missing intern. How
many people have died from cancer since Chandra disappeared? My
cousin, Lori, for one. Surely cancer research is as important as a
missile defense system. How many Americans have suffered and died
from nuclear bombs, HOW MANY FROM CANCER?

What do you fear most? Being nuked by a Rogue Nation, or cancer?
Which is most likely to GET YOU?

CHRIS LANE GRAY
Monticello, Ark.
Email cgray@seark.net

Looking for O'Neill interview

Reference the editorial on page 2 of the 7/15/00
[PP]. The quoted interview with Paul O'Neill in the
Financial Times certainly does expose the true thinking of the
Bush administration. As such, it ought to be on billboards all over
the country. How can I get a copy of the entire interview? I am not
on the internet but have a friend who is.

Yours truly,George A. Tompkins, Jr.
Boonsboro, Md.

Editor's Note: As of press time, the interview
from the 5/18/01 Financial Times was available
online by searching archives at the Financial
Times web site (news.ft.com) for "Paul O'Neill" and
"Social Security." If your friend can't find it there, try searching
google.com, which often carries articles after they are deleted from
their original web site.